The US Embassy in Iraq says the State Department has ordered all non-essential, non-emergency government staff to leave the country right away amid escalating tensions with Iran.
The alert, published on the embassy’s website on Wednesday, comes after Washington last week said it had detected new and urgent threats from Iran and its proxy forces in the region targeting Americans and American interests.
On Sunday, the embassy advised Americans to avoid travel to Iraq, citing “heightened tensions.”
Meanwhile, the German government said the country's military has suspended training of Iraqi soldiers due to tensions in the region between the US and Iran but has no indication of any specific threat to its own troops.
German Defense Ministry spokesman Jens Flosdorff says that Germany is "orienting itself toward our partner countries, which have taken this step."
But he stressed that "there is no concrete threat" and the decision is down to the security situation in general being viewed as more tense.
Germany currently has about 160 German soldiers in Iraq as part of the fight against the ISIS group, about 60 of them at a base north of Baghdad where Iraqi forces are being trained.
Flosdorff said that training could in principle resume within days.
